Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

223 Pages·2011·8.731 MB·English

by  Greg Forter

GENDER, RACE, AND
MOURNING IN
AM ERICAN MODERNISM
GREG FORTER
University of South Carolina
SSI Cambridge
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© Greg Forter 2011
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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
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First published 2011
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Forter, Greg.
Gender, race, and mourning in American modernism / Greg Forter.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 978-1-107-00472-6 (hardback)
1. American fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)-
United States. 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Race in literature.
5. Grief in literature. I. Title.
PS310.M57F67 2011
813'.52093532^022
2010051117
isbn 978-1-107-00472-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
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Contents
Acknowledgements page vi
Introduction i
1 Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of
impersonal form in The Great Gatsby 15
2 Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic
embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia 54
3 Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white
man’s history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! 96
4 The Professor’s House: primitivist melancholy and
the gender of utopian forms 137
Afterword 178
Notes 194
Index 214
v
Acknowledgements
It is at once gratifying and humbling to take stock of how much this
book owes to others. I wish especially to thank Seth Moglen, whose
pathbreaking work, perceptive reading of the manuscript, and per­
sonal generosity made him the best kind of intellectual comrade; Susan
Courtney, who read and responded to numerous drafts and enriched my
life during the book’s composition; and Nina Levine, whose trenchant
(yet affirming) critiques of individual chapters made the book better than
it would otherwise have been.
Kate Brown reflected back to me a central part of the book’s argument
before I was able to articulate it. Rebecca Stern helped me conceptual­
ize the introduction and improve my discussions of Fitzgerald and
Faulkner. Agnes Mueller and Nicholas Vazsonyi supported my thinking
with their kindness and rigor, as well as by giving me a place to stay dur­
ing a month’s sojourn in Berlin (where I wrote most of the chapter on
Absalom, Absalom!). Larry Glickman, Jill Frank, my brother Mike, Marisa
Gonzalez, and Bob Bohl all submitted gracefully to more discussions of
my ideas than they doubtless wanted, while giving the gift of their love
and friendship.
I feel especially fortunate to have landed in the English department
at the University of South Carolina, where the sense of community
runs deep. Among those to whom I am grateful for intellectual and/or
emotional sustenance are Pamela Barnett, Bob Brinkmeyer, Debra Rae
Cohen, Mark Cooper, Flolly Crocker, Cynthia Davis, Mindy Fenske,
Brian Glavey, Anne Gulick, Tony Jarrells, Cat Keyser, Ed Madden, John
Muckelbauer, Dan Smith, Meili Steele, and Gretchen Woertendyke.
Steven Lynn and Bill Rivers provided essential support and guidance dur­
ing their respective tenures as Chair.
Others who offered encouragement and convivial discussion include
Marshal Alcorn, Mitch Breitwieser, Cathy Caruth, Marilyn Charles,
Heidi Cooley, Mac Davis, Carl Eby, Christine Erskine, Lee Jane Kaufman,
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Gerald Kennedy, Lynne Layton, John T. Matthews, Helene Moglen, Rick
Moreland, Allen Miller, Sheila Namir, James Phelan, Patricia Rae, Esther
Rashkin, Evelyn Schreiber, Kaja Silverman, Henry Sussman, Jean Wyatt,
and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. Thanks also to Ray Ryan at Cambridge
University Press, who believed in the project and skillfully shepherded it
through to publication. The Press’s external reviewers made suggestions
that improved the clarity and precision of my arguments.
Tracy Bealer, Jennifer Brackett, and Kevin Kyzer provided expert
research assistance; Tracy’s editorial acumen strengthened the introduc­
tions to individual chapters as well. I owe, finally, a special debt to the
many students who took these ideas seriously enough to help me remem­
ber why they matter.
A residency fellowship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Research
Center in American Modernism enabled me to research and write sub­
stantial portions of the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to the
Center’s director, Barbara Buhler Lynes, and its librarian, Eumie Imm-
Stroukoff, for making my sojourn in Santa Fe, New Mexico, both possi­
ble and productive; and to my fellow fellows, Bill Anthes, Alan Braddock,
Linda Kim, and Mark White, for making it so intellectually pleasurable.
The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina
provided invaluable summer funding at an early stage of the pro­
ject; the English department did the same at a later stage. A Research
Professorship from the department freed me from teaching for a semester,
thereby enabling me to complete a draft of the manuscript. An Associate
Professor Development Grant from the college helped me to finish the
final version.
Earlier and substantially different versions of chapters i and 3
appeared as “Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory,
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief,”
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.2 (2003): 134—70;
and “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary
Form,” Narrative 15.3 (2007): 259-85. A very provisional exposition of
some ideas in chapter 2 appeared as “Melancholy Modernism: Gender
and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway Review
21.1 (2001): 22—37. I am grateful to these journals’ editors for permis­
sion to reprint.

Introduction
This book approaches canonical modernism in the USA as a response to
changes in the sex/gender and racial systems that took place between 1880
and 1920. The authors I discuss experienced these transformations largely
in the mode of loss-, they felt themselves cut off, that is, from the form of
white manhood that had been dominant in the years prior to 1880. They
responded to this loss in what I show was a melancholic manner. Their
works attempted to grieve the loss, but the grief was characterized by a
deep ambivalence and unconscious aggression that crippled and blocked
the work of mourning. My chapters trace the vicissitudes of this dynamic
in major works by four authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), William Faulkner’s
Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Willa Cather’s
The Professor’s House (1925).
Each of these works fantasmatically “works over” the historical materials
it engages. Each of them gives a highly condensed, allegorical account of
the processes endangering nineteenth-century white manhood, and each
enacts a specifically aesthetic kind of melancholic grief. Nevertheless, a set
of real, historical transformations subtends these aesthetic engagements. It
may be helpful to begin by sketching the relevant processes in some detail.
From about 1830 to 1880, the dominant form of white manhood in the
USA was characterized by an interplay of qualities that would separately
have been seen as a gendered binary. On one hand, to be a (white) man
meant to “make oneself” in the capitalist marketplace - to achieve eco­
nomic autonomy, self-sufficiency, and ownership of productive property.
Tbe qualities that enabled such success were an aggressive assertiveness
and competitive vigor thought of as innately male. Successful manhood
was imagined, in other words, as the realization of an instinct for domi­
nation that was rooted in the male body, the expression of which could
alone enable the economic and psychic autonomy so central to American
conceptions of success.
1
2 Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism
On the other hand, this aggressive competitiveness was viewed with
suspicion for its threat to social cohesion. Were it given full rein beyond
the manly sphere of work, the dominative will would make social order
impossible to maintain. This instinct therefore had to be countered by a
range of softer virtues — moral compassion, self-restraint, emotional sen­
sitivity. These virtues were thought to be natural to white women in the
same way that competitive aggression was thought of as natural to men;
the virtues could, in fact, be transmitted to men only by women in the
domestic sphere. The division of spheres was in this sense a mechanism
for socializing men by giving them a place to develop their compassionate
interiors — to cultivate feelings and dispositions that could not be safely
indulged at work but were indispensable to mens roles as citizens, fathers,
and husbands. “From this point of view, the social fabric was torn every
day in the world and mended every night at home,” writes E. Anthony
Rotundo. “Men’s sphere depleted virtue, women’s sphere renewed it.”1
In the final decades of the century, however, a range of developments
disturbed the relative stability of this division. These developments had
primarily to do with transformations in the economic sphere, where the
promise of autonomous self-making was increasingly thwarted by a mon­
opoly capitalism that reduced men to dependents in large bureaucratic
structures. “The number of salaried, nonpropertied workers (virtually
all white-collar) multiplied eight times between 1870 and 1910,” writes
Rotundo. “Twenty percent of the total male work force was white-collar
by 1910.”2 This new kind of employment “offered neither autonomy nor
ownership of productive property.”3 The result was a sense of depend­
ence and disempowerment that many men felt as unmanning. Michael
Kimmel quotes one observer, for example, who claimed that to “‘put a
man upon wages is to put him in the position of a dependent’ and that
the longer he holds that position, the more his capacities atrophy and ‘the
less of a man ... he becomes.’” A second observer lamented “the ‘steady
degeneration of men’ brought on by the ‘spectacle of men working at tasks
which every woman knows she could easily undertake.’”4
According to Kimmel, Rotundo, and others, American men responded
to this disempowerment in a range of related ways. There was, to begin
with, a discursive shift: a move away from the term manhood, defined in
opposition to boyhood, and toward the term masculinity, defined in oppos­
ition to femininity) What made one a man now was less that one had
successfully grown up than that one was persuasively not a woman — a shift
that bespoke a heightened need to police the borders between male and
female identities. (This need was intensified by first-wave feminists’ claims
Introduction 3
to the sexual and political rights of men, as well as by the emergence of
gay subcultures whose “inverts” raised the visible specter of a “femininity”
lurking in all men.)6 More significant than this discursive transformation
was a wholesale revaluation of the gendered division of spheres. The “civ­
ilizing” virtues of women were now recast as emasculating dangers, forces
that turned boys into sissies and threatened the “feminization of American
culture.”7 Men, accordingly, sought to expel the “feminine” within them
while embracing as positive traits those attributes that had previously
been coded ambivalently — primal male force, instinctual vitality, aggres­
sion, and bodily strength.8 This response entailed in part what Kimmel
has called “the consumption of manhood”: the vicarious identification,
through sports and other consumer activities, with older, more autono­
mous, and more artisanal forms of manhood. For:
Just as the realm of production had been so transformed that men could no
longer anchor their identity in ... the market, [they] created new symbols, the
consumption of which ‘reminded’ men of that secure past, evoking an age before
identity crises, before crises of masculinity — a past when everyone knew what it
meant to be a man and achieving one’s manhood was a given.9
The processes described so far had explicitly racial meanings as well.
The reconfigurations of capitalism that subordinated white men to
bureaucratic structures simultaneously opened new labor markets for eth­
nic immigrants and African American freed men, thereby troubling the
link between selling one’s labor on the open market and experiencing
oneself as “white.”10 (This link had of course begun to be challenged by
the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War.) The cult of virility in
this sense served as a compensatory preserve for an expressly white man­
liness. Through it, white men engaged in practices aimed at recovering a
privileged identity imperiled by the incursion of non-white laborers in the
workplace, as well as by the “feminizing” effects of capitalist modernity.
At the same time, as Gail Bederman has persuasively shown, the fan­
tasy of a lost male essence was often constructed through identifications
with racial “darkness” and otherness." The primitive vitality that men
thought necessary to combating modern capital’s enervations was drawn
from conceptions of the racial other (especially men of African descent),
whom white men imagined as having escaped the repressive constraints
of modern civilization. An identification with the racial primitive thus
worked paradoxically to bolster white manhood by providing it with a
barbarous physicality that served as the antidote to bourgeois modernity’s
purportedly feminizing dangers.
4 Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism
The effort to recover a lost essence of manliness was not, however,
the only response to this period’s social changes. Canonical modern­
ism engaged in a rather different kind of project. That this project was
at heart melancholic is the wager of all that follows; but aesthetic mel­
ancholia was itself the solution to an affective dilemma whose contours
differed markedly from the one described so far. The authors I discuss
sought to grieve not just for the loss of the aggressively masculine com­
ponent of nineteenth-century white manhood, but also for the loss of its
compassionate interior — its “feminine” capacity for sympathetic iden­
tification and abrogation of the self’s borders. They tended to describe
this femininity as a creatively lyrical and sensuous responsiveness. They
tailored it to the demands of their creative aspirations, and did so in
response to the increasing subordination of creativity to instrumental rea­
son within bourgeois modernity, and the increasing denigration of non-
commodifiable, non-instrumentalizable desires as feminine. The first of
these (modernity’s instrumentalization of creative labor) led these writers
to conceive of creativity as a pivotal part of what modernity imperiled: to
be an artist was for them to be forced to retrieve art from its ceaseless
absorption into the commodity form. The second factor cemented the
connection between this imperiled capacity and the feminine, even as it
required the detachment of “feminine” responsiveness from its contem­
porary disparagement.
A striking result of these two factors was that the authors in my study
came to yearn for a masculinity less rigidly polarized against the femin­
ine. Their works attempted to embody a manhood that included a lyrically
artisanal (i.e., precapitalist) and often explicitly “feminine” responsive­
ness. If one kind of masculinity that emerged in this period was thus
built around a repudiation of qualities associated with white woman­
hood — feelingfulness, moral compassion, etc. — canonical modernism
was distinguished in part by its effort to rewrite, reclaim, and celebrate
the feminine as a repository of residual and potentially resistant value.
This effort was countered by an equally powerful yet conflicting inclin­
ation. Behind this latter lay the fact that for historical reasons none of
these writers could avoid internalizing the imperatives of the emergent
gender order.12 All of them - including Cather — came in part to identify
with the hard, invulnerable, and dominative white manhood consolidated
in this period, and all came to denigrate a feminine responsiveness that
they also experienced as intimately linked to their creative powers. The
resulting ambivalence was both psychically devastating and decisive to
the emergence of canonical modernism. It meant that the very qualities